Mechanism of Method Employment

How do methods become employed by a community in theory assessment?

When the classical philosophy of science finally came to terms with the fact that methods of theory assessment do in fact change through time, the question became how exactly they change. Since circa 1980, explaining the process of transitions from one employed method to the next has been one of the most challenging tasks for any theory of scientific change. A proper answer to this question helps to shed light on one of the key aspects of scientific change.

In the scientonomic context, this question was first formulated by Hakob Barseghyan in 2015. The question is currently accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by Scientonomy community.

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question can be summarized as follows:

• A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.
• A norm becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.

Broader History

A number of philosophers of science addressed the question of method employment before the inception of scientonomy. Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Dudley Shapere, Larry Laudan, and Ernan McMullin all suggested that our theories about the world shape our methods of theory evaluation.

Thomas Kuhn can be credited by articulating this idea first in his Structure as part of his conception of paradigm shifts.1

Dudley Shapere greatly developed the idea of beliefs affecting methods of theory evaluation in his The Character of Scientific Change, where he argued that the criteria scientists employ in theory assessment are not transcendent to science but are an integral part of it.2

Similarly, in his Science and Values, Larry Laudan argued that the discovery of previously unaccounted effects (such as placebo effect or experimenter's bias) resulted in the formulation of new methods of drug testing.3pp. 38-39

The same idea has been expressed around the same time by Ernan McMullin. In his account of the transition from the Aristotelian Medieval method to the hypothetico-deductive method in the early 18th century, McMullin shows that the employment of the hypothetico-deductivism was a result of accepting that the world is more complex than it appears in our observations.4pp. 32-34

There have been many other attempts at explaining how methods of theory evaluation come to be employed by a community (e.g. the reconstructions of Plato’s method performed by David Lindberg5pp. 37-38).

Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar and other have suggested that methods of science are determined to a large degree by the underlying sociocultural factors.67

Paul Feyerabend went as far as to argue that in many cases methods are chosen in an arbitrary fashion.8

Scientonomic History

In the context of scientonomy the answer to this question has been traditionally provided by the third law. Until 2016 it was the third law as formulated by Hakob Barseghyan.9p. 54

In this formulation, it wasn't clear whether employed methods follow from all or only some of the accepted theories and employed methods of the time. This led to a logical paradox which was resolved by Zoe Sebastien in 2016. In her reformulation of the law, Sebastien made explicit that an employed method need not necessarily follow from all other employed methods and accepted theories but only from some of them.10 This made it possible for an employed method to be logically inconsistent and yet compatible with openly accepted methodological dicta.

Acceptance Record

Here is the complete acceptance record of this question (it includes all the instances when the question was accepted as a legitimate topic for discussion by a community):

Community	Accepted From	Acceptance Indicators	Still Accepted	Accepted Until	Rejection Indicators
Scientonomy	1 January 2016	This is when the community accepted its first answer to this question, The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015), which indicates that the question is itself considered legitimate.	Yes

All Theories

The following theories have attempted to answer this question:

Theory	Formulation	Formulated In
The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)	A method becomes employed only when it is deducible from other employed methods and accepted theories of the time.	2015
The Third Law (Sebastien-2016)	A method becomes employed only when it is deducible from some subset of other employed methods and accepted theories of the time.	2016
The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022)	A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic.	2022

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Accepted Theories

The following theories have been accepted as answers to this question:

Community	Theory	Accepted From	Accepted Until
Scientonomy	The Third Law (Barseghyan-2015)	1 January 2016	21 January 2017
Scientonomy	The Third Law (Sebastien-2016)	21 January 2017	21 February 2024
Scientonomy	The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022)	21 February 2024

Suggested Modifications

Here is a list of modifications concerning this topic:

Modification	Community	Date Suggested	Summary	Verdict	Verdict Rationale	Date Assessed
Sciento-2016-0001	Scientonomy	3 September 2016	Accept a new formulation of the third law to make it clear that employed methods do not have to be deducible from all accepted theories and employed methods but only from some.	Accepted	There was a community consensus that "the new formulation of the third law does bring an additional level of precision to our understanding of the mechanism of method change".c1 The community agreed that the new formulation "makes a clarification that, on its own, warrants this modification's acceptance".c2 Importantly, it was also agreed that the modification "solves the paradox of normative propositions".c3	21 January 2017
Sciento-2022-0002	Scientonomy	28 February 2022	Accept the new law of norm employment that fixes some of the issues of the current law of method employment and makes it applicable to norms of all types.	Accepted	Prior to the 2024 workshop, Hakob Barseghyan commented on the encyclopedia with his opinion that the modification should be accepted given that the formulation seemed relatively future-proof: it would not have to change even if more elements are included into our ontology. Paul Patton and Cameron Scott raised some concerns about the differences between norm employment and norm acceptance, and about the derivability of norms from agents’ mosaics, given cases in the history of science where agents accept a norm that is derivable from their mosaic but do not act accordingly (that is, they fail to employ the norm). However, it was noted that this is a separate issue from what the modification aims to do: the law of norm employment does not describe what happens to norms that are already present in the mosaic, but merely describes how norms come to be part of the mosaic. Yet, the discrepancy in the community’s accepted definitions of norm acceptance (as a subtype of theory acceptance) and norm employment was highlighted as a pertinent issue for later focus. After this clarification, there were no further issues raised, and the modification was accepted by over a two-thirds majority of voters. 14 out of 16 votes were for acceptance.	21 February 2024

Current View

In Scientonomy, the accepted answers to the question are The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022) and The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022).

The Law of Method Employment (Rawleigh-2022) states: "A method becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic."

This law of method employment is a corollary of Rawleigh's law of norm employment. It implies that, just like the norms of all other types, methods become employed when they are derivable from other elements of the agent's mosaic (such as other theories, other methods, and perhaps even questions). As such, the law preserves most of the content of Sebastien's third law by solving some of the issues inherent in it. See The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022) for a more thorough exposition.

Mechanism of Norm Employment

The Law of Norm Employment (Rawleigh-2022) states: "A norm becomes employed only if it is derivable from a non-empty subset of other elements of the mosaic."

Sebastien's law of method employment faces several problems. Foremost among these is that it is based on an outdated ontology that assumes that methods of theory evaluation are a fundamental epistemic element. After the acceptance of Barseghyan’s proposal that methods be subsumed under the category of normative theories, the third law no longer exhaustively covers all situations cases of employment. In its present form it is limited to methods, though there is no reason to think that the mechanism by which a method is employed is any different than the mechanism by which any other norm is employed.

In addition, Sebastien's formulation of the third law uses the term deducible, which currently lacks a scientonomic definition. We do not currently know what it means for something to be deducible, what the criteria of deducibility would be, or whether the conditions of deducibility would be part of the first-order theories of the mosaic or part of the second-order theories that range over the mosaic.

The third issue with Sebastien's formulation is that, with the acceptance of questions into the epistemic elements of the ontology of scientific change, the elements of the mosaic are now more expansive than just theories and subtypes of theories. This means that there is a plausible situation in which norms could potentially be derived – at least in part – from questions, which means that a formulation of the third law that excludes questions would fail to comprehensively describe all cases of norm employment.

The new law of norm employment aims to remedy all three of these issues:

• the formulation of the covers all norms rather than only methods;
• it replaces a deducible with derivable, which in the context of mathematical model theory simply means to be semantically entailed, and thus can potentially include non-deductive inferences (e.g. inductive, abductive);
• it replaces a specific enumeration of epistemic elements with a general "elements of the mosaic".

This formulation also offers the slight clarification that derivability strictly deals with derivation from a finite number of other elements.

Related Topics

This question is a subquestion of Mechanism of Scientific Change. It has the following sub-topic(s):

• Deducibility in Method Employment
• Implementation vs. Employment of Methods
• Methodology and Methods
• Role of Used Theories in Method Employment
• Synchronism vs. Asynchronism of Method Employment
• The Paradox of Normative Propositions

This topic is also related to the following topic(s):

• Mechanism of Theory Acceptance
• Role of Sociocultural Factors in Method Employment